2023-04-29 19:00:03
“Marie-Laure de Noailles. The Viscountess of the Weird”, Laurence Benaïm, Texto, 480 p., 12 €.
“Deliver on demand”, by Varian Fry, preface by Albert Hirschman, translated from English (United States) by Edith Ochs, I read, 380 p., €8.90.
“After Russia”, by Marina Tsvétaïéva, translated from Russian, preface and notes by Bernard Kreise, Rivages poche, “Little library”, 160 p., €8.70.
If she did not become “Viscountess” that in 1923, by her marriage to her stellar double, the hectic Viscount Charles de Noailles (1891-1981), sumptuous aesthete, intemperate sportsman and meticulous landscape designer, “weird”, Marie Laure de Noailles (1902-1970) was birth: flowed in her, through her grandmother Chevigné and her father, the blood of the Sades and the Bischoffsheims, those of the internee of Charenton (whose manuscript of the 120 Days of Sodom) and a dynasty of billionaire Belgian bankers, inclined to scientific patronage or lavish carousing.
From this explosive hereditary cocktail stems a life whose achievements coincide with the history of 20th century art.e century: design and construction, in Hyères, of the Villa Mallet-Stevens, a cubic sanctuary; production and propulsion, in the pond of bourgeois conformism, of three cinematic cobblestones: The Mysteries of the Château de Dé (Man Ray, 1929), L’Age d’or (Luis Bunuel, 1930) and The Blood of a Poet (Jean Cocteau, 1930); financial sowing so that creation germinates, elite and popular, from Igor Stravinsky to Salvatore Adamo (in whom she saw “the Chopin of our time”), from decorator Jean-Michel Frank to actor and filmmaker Pierre Clémenti. A frenzy that the biography of Laurence Benaïm renders with intensity, leaving the Viscountess de Noailles the image of a Virgin of charity taking under a coat tailored by Chanel Crevel, Picasso or Cocteau.
Sous l’Occupation, the role of the American Varian Fry (1907-1967), journalist and future Righteous Among the Nations, is defined as follows: to ensure that the friends and admirers of Marie Laure de Noailles, quartered in Paris, are not assassinated by the Nazis. A precocious anti-Hitler activist, settled in Marseilles in August 1940, he created, with the American Relief Center, an association for aid to refugees recognized by Vichy, a lifeline which served to rescue and exile nearly 2,200 people. .
Behind the humanitarian screen was set up, until the expulsion of Fry in August 1941, a network of illegal crossings and the making of false papers, fake visas or forms of convenience. If many profited from it, whose name we have not retained, a string of celebrities saved just in time ensured the celebrity of their savior a posteriori. The list looks like a table plan at a Noailles dinner – André Breton and Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp and Stéphane Hessel, Max Ophüls or André Masson. A heroic priesthood whose Deliver on demand, written by Fry himself, offers us the daily constraints, the necessary improvisations and the risky bets. Wonders of cunning and courage made possible by a squad of audacious people – local mafia, American gigolo, French civil servant.
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